Over 15 excruciating minutes, Zack Polanski left himself in a real state

In the end, the people of Holborn and the people of St Pancras opted for a one-state solution and Zack Polanski wasn’t it. At one point, this, the Sir Keir Starmer-enforced by-election had been considered too close to call, but it didn’t work out that way. At 3am, it was declared that Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali beat the Green Party by more than 3,000 votes, 12,292 to 8,298. Sadly that’s a margin of defeat that can’t just be enlarged away through the power of the mind. By the time Polanski made it to the BBC Today programme studio five hours later, the Green Party’s hypnotist-in-chief could feel his spell very rapidly wearing off. By the end of the interview, the only tit that was looking any bigger was himself. Most commented 1 My partner died. Then I found a text: ‘Shall we have an affair?’ Sex & Relationships 230 comments 2 I sleep with my dogs. A new study proves it’s better for me Pets 133 comments 3 Harvey Elliott was England’s next great hope. Now he’s out of the picture Football 71 comments 4 500 arrested as French police use tear gas during student protests Europe 52 comments 5 Oliver Glasner: Premier League’s integrity at risk if Man City case drags on Football 33 comments For six whole weeks, from September to mid-October, the Greens have fought a by-election in North London in which none of its many door knockers, no pun intended, have required a coat or even a light sweater. It came at the end of a ruinously hot summer . It will perhaps be remembered as a curious time for the Greens to decide they’ve outgrown the environment and are now ready for the big time, which is to say, arguing incessantly about the complexities of the Israel/Palestine question, to the benefit of absolutely no one. Top stories 1 Trump Jr’s ex-fiancée ‘asked donor to pay 0k credit card bill’ US politics 2 Trump’s war with Iran doubles the cost of his rides in ‘the Beast’ US politics 3 Starbucks ‘explores takeover’ of Chipotle Mexican Grill US business 4 ‘More lives will be lost’ unless UK takes action on wildfires Environment Before the result had even come in, the former Green Party leader, the near universally liked and admired Caroline Lucas, had been asked on Newsnight about Polanski’s future as party leader , and had said: “Let’s just see what happens in the coming days and weeks.” Caroline Lucas appeared on Newsnight on Thursday James McCauley/Shutterstock It was almost quaint. On the off chance The Celebrity Traitors’ Ross Kemp was watching, this actually was an act of murder in plain sight . Advertisement The BBC’s Nick Robinson asked Polanski why it was he had lost. “On the doorstep,” he told him, “people said: ‘We agree with you, but we want to give Andy Burnham a chance.’” Patrick Maguire: Zack Polanski faces harshest scrutiny of his leadership yet Well, fair enough then. That’s not his fault. It was just his unimaginable bad luck that the by-election had coincided with a new prime minister. Perhaps no one had even told him that the previous one had stepped down, which was sort of why the whole thing was even happening. He’d tried his best but he’d lost because, ultimately, the voters had just decided to vote in much larger numbers for his rival candidate, and how could he possibly be blamed for that? A long night for Zack Polanski and some tough questions come morning James Veysey/Shutterstock “We just tripled our vote share and had our second-best by-election result in Green Party history!” Polanski told him. At the general election, an independent pro-Palestine candidate called Andrew Feinstein had come second in Holborn & St Pancras and the Greens’ third. This time round, Feinstein backed the Greens, and the combined share was almost exactly the same. The “tripling” of the vote share is something of a mirage. John Curtice: Greens can take comfort from Holborn, but questions for Reform Advertisement Over the next few days, Polanski will have to fight for his political life, and the fight will take the exact same form as it took for 15 excruciating minutes with Nick Robinson. He’ll have to try to articulate quite why it is that his party voted for a motion which declared, in highly incendiary fashion, that “Zionism is racism,” at the same time as trying to explain why he, the party leader, didn’t turn up to take part in that vote. He will now have to try to control the thing he knew he couldn’t control, which is why he didn’t try in the first place. Top stories 1 New How Bob Marley became an unlikely beneficiary of the slave trade History 2 New Milos Raonic: Wimbledon finalist to investment banker at Goldman Sachs Tennis 3 South African lawyer Navi Pillay wins 2026 Nobel peace prize Europe 4 New Mortgage rates dip after weeks of painful rises Mortgages 5 New ‘My husband’s family want us to pay £500 towards his sister’s holiday’ Ask Times Money Why didn’t he take part in the vote, Robinson wanted to know. “I was running in a very prominent by-election,” he said. “Oh come off it Mr Polanski,” he was told. “If you wanted to be at a motion in your own conference, of course you could be there. You don’t need to insult the intelligence of people listening.” Polanski applauds Sagal Abdi-Wali James Veysey/Shutterstock Editorial It’s not going to be very easy for Polanski, that the defence he will have to rely on, over and over again, is indeed an insult to the intelligence of those who will have to hear it. Advertisement He was asked, at least five times, whether the state of Israel has a right to exist, and on no occasion did he reply with the word “yes”. Whenever it is put to people like Zack Polanski that maybe their issues with the Israeli government have perhaps tipped over into blatant antisemitism, they take great pleasure in citing all the Jewish people who agree with them, the Israeli people who protest against the actions of the Netanyahu government. But these people tend not to struggle in quite this way with the question of whether the state of Israel has a right to exist because, for the most part, they live in it, and so it not existing would be quite the rigmarole. He was also asked whether, as leader of the Green Party, he should have perhaps made more of an effort to discover that the author of the motion, the one that has all but destroyed the fortunes of his party, was a woman called Lubna Speitan , who was named in court documents as a “close friend” of a man who was jailed in the US for 40 years for being a member of al-Qaeda, and who had plotted a suicide attack at Heathrow. “That’s obviously horrific,” he said, which it obviously is, but it’s just as obviously horrific that, as leader, he’d done nothing about it. It’s also obviously horrific to have to listen to this stuff over your cornflakes. It’s horrific that these questions have to be asked, and it’s horrific, though not surprising, that Zack Polanski doesn’t have any answers.